PROBLEMS AND SOME SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS IN STUDYING WRITING ENGLISH OF SOPHOMORES AT THE DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN SAIGON UNIVERSITY

The purpose of this study was to determinewhat difficulties Saigon University second-year students encounter when learning to writeacademic English.. INTRODUCTIONIt can be clearly seen t

SAIGON UNIVERSITY FOREIGN LANGUAGE DEPARTMENT

HO CHI MINH CITY, JUNE 2020

SAIGON UNIVERSITY FOREIGN LANGUAGE DEPARTMENT

HO CHI MINH CITY, JUNE 2020

GROUP 2 STUDENT ID CONTRIBUTION SIGNATURE

No Criteria Full mark Examiner 1 Examiner 2

TABLE OF CONTENT

Title page 1

List of members 3

1 Content 5

2 Abstract 6

3 Introduction 7

4 Literature Review 8

5 Notion of original research 11

6 Research Questions 12

7 Research Methods 13

8 Analysis 15

9 Proposed Chapter Outline 16

10 Research Limitation 17

11 Proposed Timescale 18

12 References 19

APPENDIX - QUESTIONNAIRES

2 ABSTRACT

Academic writing skills mostly involve linguistic competence development of student s whichmany learners may identify it as a challenging task The purpose of this study was to determinewhat difficulties Saigon University second-year students encounter when learning to writeacademic English To carry out this research, the questionnaire is used to collect data A finalremark to be made is that results reveal that most students face difficulties in grammar, spelling,coherence, vocabulary, prepositions, and punctuations

Key words: Writing, grammar

3 INTRODUCTION

It can be clearly seen that writing skill plays an important role in studying a foreign language and

it has always been an essential skill that learners strive to be skillful at Through writing, studentsare capable of sharing ideas, feelings, persuading and convincing others According to Davies(1985), "writing is essentially a creative process and good writers must learn to communicatetheir ideas clearly to an unseen audience”

However, it is observed that writing in a second language seems to be hard to achieve by moststudents due to many problems To begin with, teachers often give feedback merely underliningthe mistakes and errors but hardly provide any constructive comments for correct writing for theirstudents Additionally, students learning writing usually study without motivation because theprocess is too difficult Most importantly, the challenges are mainly linked to the lack of manyvocabularies, and grammar, lack of written exercises and ideas It is supported by Sulasti (2003),

“the problems that they mostly face is about how to write, what to be written, and lack ofvocabulary words as well as incompetence in structure” As a common result, these lead toadverse effects in learning writing skill of sophomores majoring in English for Business andTourism at Sai Gon University

Consequently, the current study comes to investigate the main challenges and difficulties thatface SGU’s learners majoring in English when they write, and to propose solutions to overcomewriting difficulties Moreover, this research may provide a reference for teachers having writingclasses as well as improving students’ performance

4 LITERATURE REVIEW 4.1 What is writing?

It can be seen that there has been a large number of academic research on writing skills until now.Writing has been widely regarded as a crucially essential skill in the teaching and learning ofEnglish as a second language as it is a comprehensive skill that helps reinforce vocabulary,grammar, thinking, planning, editing, revising, and other elements Writing also helps to improveall the other skills of listening, speaking, and reading as they are all interrelated (Saed

& Al-Omari, 2014) But first, what is writing? Nunan (2003) noted that “writing is both aphysical and mental activity At the most basic level, writing is the physical act of committingwords or ideas to some medium On the other hand, writing is the mental work of inventing ideas,thinking about how to express them, and organizing them into statements and paragraphs that will

be clear to a reader” Basically, writing is a form of communication that allows students to puttheir feelings and ideas on paper, to organize their knowledge and beliefs into convincingarguments, and to convey meaning through well-constructed text Finocchiaro (1974) stated thatstudents’ should be encouraged to express their ideas, experiences, thoughts, and feelings.According to Dumais (1988), writing in English is meant to fill the gap that exists between theability to express ideas, feelings, opinions, and others in Indonesia and the ability to express thesame things in written form in English It means that by written forms, someone can expressideas and sense more correctly In writing, we have to choose the good and right words andphrases and must follow the proper structure

4.2 The importance of writing

As Walsh (2010) says “writing is important because it is used extensively in higher education and

in the workplace If students don’t know how to express themselves in writing, they will not beable to communicate well with professors, employers, peers, or just about anyone else” Much ofprofessional communication is done in writing: proposals, reports, applications, preliminaryinterviews, e-mails, and more are part of the daily life of a college student or successful graduate.Writing has a unique position in language teaching since its acquisition

involves a practice and knowledge of other three language skills, such as listening, reading andspeaking There is a dramatic increase in self-confidence and self-esteem which writing tends todevelop among learners Learners also tend to discover things for themselves about the languageand about themselves too, thus promoting personal as well as linguistic growth Inevitably, thesegains are reflected in a corresponding growth in positive motivation.

4.3 Difficulties in writing

According to the researchers, writing is a reflective activity and requires thinking, ideas, relevantknowledge and vocabulary The writing in second language becomes even more difficult task forthe students

4.3.1 Writing and speaking skills

In English skills, writing is considered to be harder than speaking because the former is moreformal than the latter, and also due to the fact that people speak more than writing in their routinelife Although writing and speaking skills are productive skills, there are still some differencesbetween these two skills As Brown and Yule (1983) say “the written language is burdened withheavy vocabulary, grammatical structures, connectors, syntax etc whereas spoken language issimpler and less elaborated (p.28) Another difference is of formality Writing is formal andcompact while speaking is not formal It is repetitive and includes a lot of pauses, use of phrases,etc As far as connectors are concerned, in speaking, they are simple such as „and ‟, „but ‟ etc.while in writing complex connectors are used Writing also includes the problems of punctuationand capitalization while speaking manifests no such problems

4.3.2 Writing and reading skills

Writing requires learning vocabulary and grammar It has also been found that good writers arealso the good readers Writing is productive while reading is a receptive skill Although both aredifferent, yet they are interrelated and have the same objective i.e learning Both the skills arelinked with language and communication of ideas Hyland (2003) rightly said “writing togetherwith reading, is a central aspect of literacy” (p.53) It means to be a literate person; it requires

proficiency in both the skills The results of the research by Charge & Taylor, (1997); Eisterhold,(1991); as cited in Sadek, p.200 (2007)) show that a strong connection exists between these twoskills Explaining the nature of connection between reading and writing skills Eisterhold (1991),

as cited in Sadek, p.233 (2003)) concluded that reading serves as input for writing He said thatbetter writers tend to be better readers and vice versa This viewpoint had already been mentioned

by (Stotsky, (1983), as cited in Kroll, p.88 (1997))

5 NOTION OF ORIGINAL RESEARCH

Many of earlier researchers have conducted a lot of studies aimed at the problem that many students encountered while learning English writing skill, as well as finding out solutions in order to help student overcome all the difficult in this skill However, it is acknowledged that there have been no researches of which focus on the students in the Foreign Language

Department of Sai Gon University Hence, this research will take this issue into a deeper

investigation and seeks for the student's common difficulties in studying writing skill and

proposes some suggested solutions to support in the future

6 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

This study focuses on the difficulties and the problems encountered by second-year students atSai Gon University in learning writing so as to identify the grammatical and lexical errors indetail and suggest solutions

This research is guided by two major questions:

1 What are the writing problems amongst sophomore?

2 What are some possible ways to address these problems?

7 RESEARCH METHOD

7.1 Approach

This study adopted a quantitative approach to explore the problems that interfere with the process

of studying English writing skills of the students in the Foreign Language Department at Sai GonUniversity and suggest improvements for the method

7.2 Population

After discussing together, our group has chosen the students from the Foreign LanguageDepartment of Saigon University as the samples for our research The reason why we chose thestudents from the Department of Foreign Languages for our research is the convenientaccessibility of our group as we are studying in the same department of Saigon University

7.3 The location

The research was conducted at Saigon University, which is located at 273 An Duong VuongStreet, District 5, Ho Chi Minh City The reason why we chose this campus was that most of thestudents in the Department of Foreign Languages were studying at this campus, so it would beeasier for us to find our research subjects

do not require complex and expensive preparation But the main reason why questionnaires will

be used is its ability to obtain practical information that will be collected from the researchsubject Aside from being inexpensive and flexible, questionnaires also help the responder feelmore comfortable and free while answering to all these questions, which makes the process ofcollecting data more effective and reliable

At first, we formed a group including four members according to the alphabetical category underour professor's suggestion After that, we started to find out the group’s research topic.Fortunately, everything worked very well as soon as we managed to choose our topic “Problemsand some suggested solutions in studying writing English of sophomores at the Department ofForeign Language at Saigon University” Following the professor’s instructions, our group leaderdivided each section for each group member; one worked with the Introduction, one with theResearch Method and the others were in charge of the last part- Results and Discussions Theleader assembled our group to carefully deliberate the purpose of our research The purposeswere given with 2 answers and our group members had to set up questions related to the topic.

We enthusiastically came out with a question to question, idea to idea Afterward, we finallysummarized the ideas and made a questionnaire with 12 multiple-choice questions Then wedecided the heading for the questionnaire, rechecked it carefully before sending it to ourprofessor for approval After we received the agreement from our professor, we continued withthe delivery of the question All the group members gathered around and came up with threemethods for delivering the questionnaires to the participants The first method that we used wasdirectly distributing it to the second-year students of the Department of Foreign Language ofSaigon University which was conducted by two persons of the group The second technique wasused to get information is making questionnaires through the Google form on the computer then

we posted it on our school group on Facebook The other two were in charge of the last method

- interviewing - which could help the team to get the accurate information from the contributor.Besides, we also wanted to emphasize in the heading that the participants’ responses will beanonymous confidential and no information could expose their identity The process ofconducting the survey took us up to two weeks, however, we all managed to finish it thoroughly.After collecting all the data, we synthesized the information and analyzed first Next, we spentthree weeks for the research writing and the paper was delivered to every member to keep upwith the progress When everything was checked carefully, the paper was printed into copies andbookbinding Finally, the research paper was submitted to our professor

8 ANALYSIS

Once we have collected data, we will be able to get information about the ways that sophomores majoring in English for Business and Tourism at Saigon University to practice their writing skills.

By analyzing how they practice their writing skills, we will be able to find out the difficulties they are having and how they deal with them to improve their writing skills After we have received the knowledge in the field of study from the lecturer, we will have a deeper and clearer understanding of the field we are researching and then we can offer ideas on how to solve these problems

9 PROPOSED CHAPTER OUTLINE

Title page I List of members II Table of content III

ABSTRACT

CHAPTER 1: THE INTRODUCTION

1.1 The setting

1.2 The literature review

1.3 Notion of original review

1.4 The purpose

CHAPTER 2: THE METHOD

2.1 The approach

2.2 The population

2.3 The location

2.4 Time

2.5 The technique

2.6 The procedures

CHAPTER 3: THE RESULTS

3.1 Analysis

CHAPTER 4: THE DISCUSSION

4.1 Original hypothesis

4.2 The findings and the explanation of the findings

10 RESEARCH LIMITATION

Naturally, the scope of this project is limited This section describes specific limitations Firstly,the number of people surveyed is limited In the research, we only surveyed more than 100second-year students majoring in English for Business and Tourism at Saigon University Thishappens due to the short duration of the study, which requires limiting the object of the study.This limitation makes the study not cover all students at different levels Besides, the results ofthe survey may yield different results for groups of students from the same field of study but fromother universities

11 PROPOSED TIME SCALE

For the limited time of the course, we predict that this research project will take 10 weeks We propose a timescale, as follow:

RESEARCH WEEK WEEK WEEK WEEK WEEK WEEK WEEK WEEK WEEK WEEK

12 REFERENCES

Lê Thanh Tùng,& Lê Minh Hoàng (2018) “Writing Skill” Quẳng gánh IELTS đi mà sống, Page 224

Brockman, E ,Taylor, M , Kreth, M , and MaryAnn K Crawford (January, 2010).”What

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Tollefson, S K Encouraging Student Writing Berkeley: Office of Educational

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Walvoord, B F Helping Students Write Well: A Guide for Teachers in All Disciplines.(2nd ed.) New York: Modern Language Association, 1986

Shewan, Dan, (2020) 16 Easy Ways To Improve Your Writing Skills

Hughes A (2003) Testing for Language teachers (2nd ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press

Hosking, Robert, (2014) Why Good Writing Skills Are Important in Today’s Workplace

— and Tips for Developing Them

Sawyer, E (2016) College essay essentials: Sourcebook

Bauld, H (2012) On writing the college application Essay (25th edition): Collins

reference

Gill, C (2014) Essential writing skills for college and beyond: writer’s digest

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